• Tag Archives creativity

  • Ruts and Graves

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                            Planting Moon

     

    The only difference between a grave and rut are the dimensions.  Oh?  At least when you’re in a rut you can still breathe.  Breathing means hope.  Nothing definite, for sure, but hope.

    This cliche points at a perceived truth, that being stuck in sameness is a living death.  And you can certainly how that might be true.  Work at a convenience store, come home, warm up a tv dinner, grab a beer, fall asleep in the recliner.  Get up and do it again.

    Or drive into the city, park the expensive car in the expensive parking slot ride the elevator up to a posh office, direct, command, leave and drive the expensive car home to the expensive house.  Get up and do it again.

    Sure.  That can mean a restricted, narrowed way of greeting this vast opportunity called life.  But.  People like me find certain routines soothing, they pave the way for creative activity, for hard concentration.  Routines allow the needs to be taken care of.  That way the non-routine acts of writing, scholarship, thinking, close looking and reading can happen on their own rhythms.

    I like the bowl of fruit, some cottage cheese and a tomato in the morning, reading the paper, having some tea, then heading downstairs to start work.  I suppose you could call that a rut, the food boring, the repetition bland, I find it nourishing and centering.  You say cereal, I have tomato.

    My opinion?  Pick your routines and habits carefully, make sure they support the things you do that matter the most, not the other around.  Then reinforce them as much as you can.  If you’re like me, that is.


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  • Artists Speak

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                                     Waning Last Frost Moon

    Loving art requires time and attentiveness, just as any relationship does.  An additional, more important impact of my visit to the Walker struck me after I finished the last post.

    In the encounter with a work of art we can bring any level of ourSelf.  The Walker, at the moment more powerfully than the MIA, allows me to visit objects with what Paul Ricoeur calls second naivete. I can visit them with the knowledge I’ve gained over the last 10 years at the MIA, yet experience them fresh, with beginner’s mind, yet, even with beginner’s mind I also have the other, more experienced me accessible, too.

    This creates a wonderful frisson, a magical moment in which the artist speaks to me through the work, not through its content, but through its creation, and in that act of creation emboldens me to create, to stretch out, to confound my highest hopes by yet higher ones, not for fame or money, but for expressive power, for a work that can do for another what these works did for me.

    So, I come away from an afternoon like this with energy borrowed from these artists and transformed within me.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture 📎and tagged

  • Emergence

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    11  bar falls 30.22  2mph NE  windchill 7   Samhain

    Last Quarter Moon of Long Nights

    Here is a new term (new to me) that has become important in my thinking:  emergence.  It comes from a discipline that fascinates me, but about which I know very little:  complexity theory.  Emergence describes those characteristics of life forms, human history and human economics that arise from the fact of life itself.   Emergent realities like value, meaning and history, according to this line of thought, do not break the laws of physics, but cannot be predicted by application of those same laws.

    Inability to predict the next action of a man or woman, the working of the markets or the next events in  human history creates a peculiar circumstance.  It means that though they break no natural laws these emergent realities do not conform to either.   Again, according to this line of thought, this lack of predictability has two sources:  agency and creativity.

    Agency is the ability to act.  Combined with consciousness in human beings this leads to creativity.  Creativity and agency make for the rich, diverse reality that is human life.

    I’m not going to go too far with this right now because I’m just beginning to absorb it. I want to understand how it relates to my work on a Ge-ology and read a critique or two before I get overly excited, but it seems like an important idea to me.


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